English

Pronunciation

Noun

feudalism (uncountable)

A social system based on personal ownership of resources and
personal fealty between a
suzerain (lord) and a
vassal (subject). Some
social-evolutionary theories hold that mankind is evolving through
several stages that started with communism and will ultimately
return there, having passed through classical society, feudalism,
and capitalism,
although these phases seem more characteristic of Europe than
elsewhere. Defining characteristics are direct ownership of
resources, personal loyalty, and a hierarchical social
structure reinforced by religion.

Although derived from the Latin word feodum
(fief), then in use, the term feudalism and the "system" it
purports to describe were not conceived of as a formal political
system by the people living in the Medieval
Period.

Defining feudalism requires qualifiers because
there is not a broadly accepted agreement of what it means. In
order to understand feudalism, a working definition is desirable
and the definition described in this article is the most senior and
classic definition still subscribed to by many historians.

Other definitions of feudalism exist. Since at
least the 1960s, many medieval historians have
included a broader social aspect, adding the peasantry bonds of manorialism, referred to as
a "feudal
society". Still others, since the 1970s, have re-examined the
evidence and concluded that feudalism is an unworkable term and
should be removed entirely from scholarly and educational
discussion (see
Revolt against the term feudalism), or at least used only with
severe qualification and warning.

Outside of a European context, the concept of
feudalism is normally used only by analogy (called semi-feudal),
most often in discussions of Japan under the
shoguns, and, sometimes,
medieval and Gondarine Ethiopia. However,
some have taken the feudalism analogy further, seeing it in places
as diverse as Ancient
Egypt, Parthian empire,
India,
to the
American South of the nineteenth century. The term feudal has
also been applied—often inappropriately or pejoratively—to
non-Western societies where institutions and attitudes similar to
those of medieval Europe are perceived to prevail. Ultimately, the
many ways the term feudalism has been used has deprived it of
specific meaning, leading many historians and political theorists
to reject it as a useful concept for understanding society.

Etymology

The earliest known use of the term feudal was in
the 17th century (1614), when the system it purported to describe
was rapidly vanishing or gone entirely. No writer in the period in
which feudalism was supposed to have flourished ever used the word
itself. It was a pejorative word used to
describe any law or custom that was seen as unfair or out-dated.
Most of these laws and customs were related in some way to the
medieval institution of the fief (Latin: feodum, a word which
first appears on a Frankish charter dated 884), and thus lumped
together under this single term. "Feudalism" comes from the French
féodalisme, a word coined during the French Revolution.

Overview

The social and economic system which characterized
most European societies in the Middle Ages goes by the name of
feudalism. The system, in its most basic essence—the
granting of land in return for military service—has
appeared all over the world in many different kinds of
society—Japan under the shogunates in the 16th century,
for example.

The center of the feudal system in medieval
Europe was the king, and a medieval king was, above everything
else, a warrior. From the 9th to the 14th centuries—the
heyday of feudalism—the most important element in making
war was the armored and mounted knight. To maintain a retinue of
knights was, however, very expensive. In return for providing the
king with warriors, tenants-in-chief were granted large holding of
land. A grant of land was known as a "feud" or a "fief": hence the
term "feudalism". The tenants-in-chief (commonly called barons in
England) received their lands directly from the king and, in turn,
leased parts of their estates to the knights, who in their turn
gave leases to yeomen.
That, at any rate, was the theory. There were places where
feudalism scarcely gained a hold, and where men held with no
obligation to anyone else: such unfettered ownership of land, known
as an allod, was, for
instance, prevalent in the south of France and Spain.

Feudalism, by its very nature, gave rise to a
hierarchy of rank, to a predominantly static social structure in
which every man knew his place, according to whom it was that he
owed service and from whom it was that he received his land. In
order to preserve existing relationships in perpetuity, rights of
succession to land were strictly controlled by various laws, or
customs, of entail. The most rigid control was provided by the
custom of primogeniture, by which
all property of a deceased landholder must pass intact to his
eldest son.

Every man was the vassal, or servant, of his
lord. He swore homage to him, and in return the lord promised to
give him protection and to see that he received justice. In theory,
then, feudalism was the expression of a society in which every man
was bound to every other by mutual ties of loyalty and service. In
fact, feudal society was marked by a vast gulf between the very
few, very rich, great landholders and the mass of the poor who
worked for the profit of the nobility. (The nobility included
bishops, for the Church was one of the greatest of medieval
landowners.) At the bottom of the social pyramid were the
agricultural laborers, or villeins, and beneath them, the peasants,
or serfs.

Until the rise of powerful monarchies with
central bureaucracies, it was the lord of the manor who was the
real ruler of society. The peasant worked the land for him and owed
him a number of feudal dues (more and more commuted to money
payments as time went by); justice was dispensed in the manorial
courts. Customs varied, but it was common for a peasant to have a
small plot, or to share a communal plot, on which to grow food for
himself and his family and to be entitled to gather firewood from
forest land for the hearth fire. More common than single plots,
however, was the system of dividing the land into strips, with each
household's strips scattered about the manor.

Western feudalism, evolving in turbulent
eighth-century France, offered aristocratic landowners potential
security in the absence of law and order. By concession or
usurpation, major landowners assumed substantial legal and
governmental power from the central government and proceeded
through private arrangements with lesser landowners to create local
militias for defensive purposes. Inherently particularistic and
initially undisciplined, feudalism enveloped the monarchy itself.
Feudalism evolved its own system of law and code of ethics for its
members as it spread throughout Europe to assume a dominant role in
the political and cultural history of the Middle Ages. Introduced
to England in 1066 by William the Conqueror, who substantially
curbed the powers of all feudal vassals while retaining
considerable central authority, feudalism incorporated three
elements: personal, property, and governmental. All members,
including the monarchs who headed the feudal system, enjoyed
specific rights but were also bound by feudal law to perform fixed
obligations.

Characteristics

Three primary elements characterized feudalism:
lords, vassals and fiefs; the structure of feudalism
can be seen in how these three elements fit together. A lord was a noble who owned land, a
vassal was a person who
was granted possession of the land by the lord, and the land was
known as a fief. In exchange for the fief, the vassal would provide
military service to the lord. The obligations and relations between
lord, vassal and fief form the basis of feudalism.

Lords, Vassals, and Fiefs

Before a lord could grant land (a
fief) to someone, he had to make that person a vassal. This was
done at a formal and symbolic ceremony called a commendation
ceremony composed of the two-part act of homage and oath of fealty. During homage, the lord
and vassal entered a contract in which the vassal promised to fight
for the lord at his command. Fealty comes from the Latin fidelitas
and denotes the fidelity owed by a vassal to his feudal lord.
"Fealty" also refers to an oath that more explicitly reinforces the
commitments of the vassal made during homage. Such an oath follows
homage. Once the commendation was complete, the lord and vassal
were now in a feudal relationship with agreed-upon mutual
obligations to one another.

The lord's principal obligation was to grant a
fief, or its revenues, to the vassal; the fief is the primary
reason the vassal chose to enter into the relationship. In
addition, the lord sometimes had to fulfill other obligations to
the vassal and fief. One of those obligations was its maintenance.
Since the lord had not given the land away, only loaned it, it was
still the lord's responsibility to maintain the land, while the
vassal had the right to collect revenues generated from it. Another
obligation that the lord had to fulfill was to protect the land and
the vassal from harm.

The vassal's principal obligation to the lord was
to provide "aid", or military service. Using whatever equipment the
vassal could obtain by virtue of the revenues from the fief, the
vassal was responsible to answer to calls to military service on
behalf of the lord. This security of military help was the primary
reason the lord entered into the feudal relationship. In addition,
the vassal sometimes had to fulfill other obligations to the lord.
One of those obligations was to provide the lord with "counsel", so
that if the lord faced a major decision, such as whether or not to
go to war, he would summon all his vassals and hold a council. The
vassal may have been required to yield a certain amount of his
farm's output to his lord. The vassal was also sometimes required
to grind his own wheat and bake his own bread in the mills and
ovens owned and taxed by his lord.

The land-holding relationships of feudalism
revolved around the fief. Depending on the power of the granting
lord, grants could range in size from a small farm to a much larger
area of land. The size of fiefs was described in irregular terms
quite different from modern area terms; see medieval
land terms. The lord-vassal relationship was not restricted to
members of the laity; bishops and abbots, for example, were also
capable of acting as lords.

There were thus different 'levels' of lordship
and vassalage. The King was a lord who loaned fiefs to aristocrats,
who were his vassals. Meanwhile the aristocrats were in turn lords
to their own vassals, Knights who were in turn lords of the manor
to the peasants who worked on the land. Ultimately, the Emperor was
a lord who loaned fiefs to Kings, who were his vassals. This
traditionally formed the basis of a 'universal monarchy' as an
imperial alliance and a world order.

History of feudalism

In order to understand better what the
term feudalism means, it is helpful to see how it was defined and
how it has been used since its seventeenth-century creation.

Invention of the concept

The word feudalism was not a
medieval term but an invention of 16th century French and English
lawyers to describe certain traditional obligations between members
of the warrior aristocracy. Not until 1748 did it become a popular
and widely used word, thanks to
Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois (The
Spirit of the Laws).

Enlightenment thinkers on feudalism

In the 18th century,
writers of the Enlightenment wrote about feudalism in order to
denigrate the antiquated system of the Ancien
Régime, or French monarchy. This was the
Age of Enlightenment when writers valued Reason and the
Middle
Ages were viewed as the "Dark Ages".
Enlightenment authors generally mocked and ridiculed anything from
the "Dark Ages" including Feudalism, projecting its negative
characteristics on the current French monarchy as a means of
political gain.

Karl Marx on feudalism

Karl Marx also
used the term in political analysis. In the 19th century, Marx
described feudalism as the economic situation coming before the
inevitable rise of capitalism. For Marx, what
defined feudalism was that the power of the ruling class (the
aristocracy) rested on their control of arable land, leading to a
class
society based upon the exploitation of the peasants who farm
these lands, typically under serfdom. “The hand-mill gives
you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the
industrial capitalist.” Marx thus considered feudalism within a
purely economic model.

Marxian theorists have been discussing feudalism
for the past 150 years. A renowned example is the extensive debate
over feudalism and capitalism between the noted Marxian economist
Paul
Sweezy and his British colleague Maurice
Dobb. (See also mode of
production.)

Historians on feudalism

Among medievalists, the term
feudalism is one of the most disputed concepts.

Debating the origins of English feudalism

In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, John
Horace Round and Frederic
William Maitland, both historians of medieval Britain, arrived
at different conclusions as to the character of English society
before the Norman
conquest in 1066. Round argued that the Normans had imported
feudalism, while Maitland contended that its fundamentals were
already in place in Britain. The debate continues to this
day.

Ganshof and the classic view of feudalism

A historian whose
concept of feudalism was highly influential in the 20th century is
François-Louis
Ganshof. Ganshof defines feudalism from a narrow legal and
military perspective, arguing that feudal relationships existed
only within the medieval nobility itself. Ganshof articulated this
concept in Feudalism (1944). His classic definition of feudalism is
the most widely known today and also the easiest to understand:
simply put, when a lord granted a fief to a vassal, the vassal
provided military service in return.

Marc Bloch and sociological views of feudalism

One of
Ganshof's contemporaries, a French historian named Marc Bloch,
was arguably the most influential 20th century medieval historian.
Bloch approached feudalism not so much from a legal and military
point of view but from a sociological one. He developed his ideas
in Feudal Society (1939). Bloch conceived of feudalism as a type of
society that was not limited solely to the nobility. Like Ganshof,
he recognized that there was a hierarchal relationship between
lords and vassals, but Bloch saw as well a similar relationship
obtaining between lords and peasants.

It is this radical notion that peasants were part
of the feudal relationship that sets Bloch apart from his peers.
While the vassal performed military service in exchange for the
fief, the peasant performed physical labour in return for
protection. Both are a form of feudal relationship. According to
Bloch, other elements of society can be seen in feudal terms; all
the aspects of life were centered on "lordship", and so we can
speak usefully of a feudal church structure, a feudal courtly (and
anti-courtly) literature, and a feudal economy. (See Feudal
society.)

Revolt against the term feudalism

In 1974, U.S. historian
Elizabeth
A. R. Brown rejected the label feudalism as an anachronism that
imparts a false sense of uniformity to the concept. Having noted
the current use of many—often contradictory—definitions of
feudalism, she argued that the word is only a construct with no
basis in medieval reality, an invention of modern historians read
back "tyrannically" into the historical record. Supporters of Brown
have suggested that the term should be expunged from history
textbooks and lectures on medieval history entirely. In Fiefs and
Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994), Susan
Reynolds expanded upon Brown's original thesis. Although some
contemporaries questioned Reynolds's methodology, other historians
have supported it and her argument. Note that Reynolds does not
object to the Marxist use of feudalism.

The term feudal has also been applied to
non-Western societies in which institutions and attitudes similar
to those of medieval Europe are perceived to have prevailed.
Ultimately, critics say, the many ways the term feudalism has been
used have deprived it of specific meaning, leading many historians
and political theorists to reject it as a useful concept for
understanding society.